


Anima Nostra

by Domimagetrix



Category: Runescape
Genre: Adult Language, Character Death, Childhood Trauma, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Excerpts from another's fics, Headcanons (Mine and Others'), Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Incest, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Mild Gore, Other, Others' Original Characters, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Trauma, Soul Headcanons, Spoilers for elements of various quests, Suicidal Ideation, Vomiting, headcanons ahoy, horrific implications
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-18
Updated: 2017-10-18
Packaged: 2019-01-18 20:22:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,994
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12395535
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Domimagetrix/pseuds/Domimagetrix
Summary: Nomad's familiarity with the soul assumes an intimate new dimension. The subject of his scrutiny? None other than one Finley Bannbreker.He also gains new insights into his longtime nemesis. Some will amuse, some will give pause, and some will reveal parallels between the two and shake even the unflappable Nomad.The lessons aren't without their price.Anima Sanitatis.





	Anima Nostra

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SaxSpieler](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SaxSpieler/gifts).



_“Ah, aye. Rellekka’s just northwest of here. About half an hour’s donner.”_

I’d been right to avoid Death with as much urgency as I’d devoted to the purpose. The afterlife itself wouldn’t spare me from that insufferably cheerful barbarian’s prattle.

Perhaps I could distance _myself_ from it?

Something ticked incrementally beneath me and sitting up was less difficult than I expected. Wood groaned in the way only living wood did when stressed and looking down explained the sound; I’d landed - or been placed - on a pathway of woven and interlocking roots that extended out by a foot and a half to either side of me and far beyond what I could see ahead.

They were growing. Not in a painfully obvious shift of roots and sprouting of stems tipped with young leaves, but evidenced in the groans and ticking from the path and from…

...other paths. Above, below, crisscrossing everywhere like living wires. Many bore fresh, bright green bits of growth and buds, a few along the edges of each path stretching out and fanning broad leaves into the darkness.

Some areas among the irregularly braided root networks were damaged, with blue-green crystal formed where the roots were bare and dark. Or, perhaps, the damaged wood had bled something that’d crystallized the way trees bled resin that hardens into amber.

It was difficult to tell and the latter seemed more likely, but the idea that the crystal had been added _to_ the unhealthy sections of root felt more accurate.

I wondered why.

The crystal glowed and illuminated the roots. More light - golden and tinted green through leaves rather than bluish - filtered through to the tree paths from little white flowers decorating healthier branches and stems. Root-walkways interrupted what was otherwise a black emptiness in every direction.

I’d made my home in subterranean chambers. Traveled through catacombs and caves, ventured into places where bioluminescent fungus inhabited both flora and fauna. I’d visited the strange plane in which Death kept residence - albeit not of my own accord - where violet clouds and nebulae turned slowly and ceaselessly into eternity.

This? Never anything like this. The sounds of growth weren’t the only sounds, either - drumbeats too deep and slow to be the product of an instrument boomed in the distance.

They weren’t loud, but they were resonant and irregular.

A grouping of them would echo across the network. Then one. Another would follow several seconds later. Silence but for the constant, tight sounds of straining wood reaching and extending itself would hold sway for as much as a minute before one, three, or as many as six beats would pound in rapid succession and travel from their source to wherever this network ended. The percussive sound refused to adhere to a rhythm.

There was a sense of the familiar about it.

_Eerie._

Nevertheless, I found myself on companionable terms with my surroundings. Growing things, no people or gods or specters hunting me down, no...

...no hunger. Or thirst. Or that _other_ pang that hadn’t known real satiation since I’d first developed it and had long ago replaced the first two in priority.

Damned if I didn’t feel… comfortable?

That was it; I was comfortable. For the first time in a lifetime.

This was an afterlife with which I could contend. Perhaps the barbarian woman’s gratingly amicable voice had been a product of my mind rather than the surroundings.

I stood and began making my way along the path, stepping carefully where the roots bulged enough to made quick strides risky.

Nothing sank beneath my weight. However these roots had come to this place, I was becoming more and more interested in their origin. They were strong, and even places where damage had been-

_-had been repaired-_

-had been responded to with crystal didn’t complain beneath my boots. This was a largely strong, healthy plant whose most grievous wounds had been tended well.

I looked again at a collection of crystal outcroppings and wondered if I was alone here.

In some places, roots had knitted themselves into circular platforms where young trees took place of pride. New leaves dotted the little limbs on the one nearest me. Another visual pass revealed other such trees in various stages of life - light green leaves and buds, richer greens and fuller leaves elsewhere, some no longer entirely green but edged with orange and yellow.

None were bare, at least none within visual range. I veered off the path and onto the platform with a budding tree.

A thin sliver of red light danced from base up into the branches and disappeared. I paused, waiting, but it didn’t recur.

_What harm could there be? I’m dead._

Ignoring the irony in the thought, I pulled a glove off and curled my hand gently around the base of the tree.

There wasn’t time enough to react before the afterlife was lost to bright light and bitterly cold air.

 

..........

 

“C’mon, Fish-Brains. I want to go exploring.”

Though I was someplace new, the sensation of smooth bark against my palm and fingers hadn’t receded with my view of the trees and bridges. Pulling the hand away returned me to the warmth and dim illumination of the afterlife, and replacing that hand against the tree brought me back to chilled air and harsh sunlight which thin cloud cover did little to diffuse.

“Ronnie?”

A pair of little girls ignored my presence as they walked by. The one who’d spoken last was small, too small to keep pace with the older one, and “Ronnie’s” insistent yanking on the younger one’s wrist made clear how little she cared for the toddler’s company or ability.

I followed them after a brief and dismissive glance around the marketplace. Wooden buildings, the smell of salt and fish in the air, and the emphasis on furs and thick fabric in the clothing of passerby pegged the place for somewhere far north.

North. And _northwest,_ at that. Edgeville hadn’t been an especially warm region and I’d experienced Daemonheim’s unforgiving wind and snow, but this cold felt familiar.

Familiar as the accent in the older girl’s words.

“Quiet! Don’t want the wolves to hear, do ye? They get a bit gutting when they hear little fish-brained brats crying their eyes out.”

 _Get a bit gutting._ I’d heard that peculiar turn of phrase before, from a woman lugging a cart packed with maple logs through the woods east of this place. She’d hauled me from my muddy predicament, offered directions to Rellekka followed by more directions to a town south of it, and had demonstrated a lack of understanding as to where the danger lay by offering me a knife to protect myself.

She’d also proceeded to plague my life thereafter, but that was of little consequence now. I was free of her optimism and her largely incomprehensible manner of speaking.

The older child dragged the younger one until the latter slipped facedown into the mud. “Ronnie” lifted her by the dress, spoke, then deposited her in an even fouler patch over a low fence.

I moved before I thought, my “free” hand seeking out the older of the two for what would be the bone-rattling shake of her young life, but my hand dipped first into and then out of her back with no resistance.

She sped off and left the littlest one struggling to stand.

I’d known children like the older girl. Cruelty had been commonplace among the ruffians in Varrock’s more dangerous alleyways and corners, but some of them…

...some had lacked whatever kept most limited to the odd beating or emptying of my pockets. The barricade between mere cruelty and other, more savage impulses had been absent in a few. It hadn’t been long before I’d learned to perceive the deficiency in a voice. To avoid those lacking it.

The older girl lacked it. She was void of some essential sense of decency in the same way the most vile street urchins had been.

The way someone else had been, years and years ago.

I fended off the thought and considered the tree again.

_These must be points of intersection in afterlives. Some Fremennik child’s meets this one and the tree acts as a conduit._

As the little one wailed in pain and puzzlement, an enormous wolf hound plucked her up by the back of her dress before trotting off. Following the hound led me to its den, where she deposited her find among her litter. The little collective lapped the human child free of mud and welcomed her presence.

I’d nearly removed my hand from the tree when an enormous Fremennik man discovered the little girl among the hounds. Their conversation didn’t hold my interest, but I caught a bit of it as the two prepared to depart for the child’s home.

“Kid - what’s yer name, again?”

“Finley. Ronnie calls me ‘Fish-Brains.’”

_Finley._

_BANNBREKER._

 

_.........._

 

Oh, but this was too rich. _Something finally managed to silence your otherwise unceasing stream of ‘keech’ for good, barbarian?_

I dropped my hand and lost contact with the tree, chuckling to myself.

The chuckling trailed off as I took in the tree, the platform, the roots and evidence of life everywhere around me with a new and terrible sense of foreboding.

No. No, it didn’t make _sense_ for her to be dead. Nothing around me supported the idea of death. There was no sign of a soul divorced from its scaffolding. I would be the first to know.

_Around me._

_No. NO!_

I crouched, a palm flat against the woven platform. For the first time since waking I thought back, trying to recall anything immediately prior to waking here.

My weapon turning end-over-end with the force of a lance’s impact. A blast, bright and blinding from the device attached - no, _become_ \- her arm. Colliding with Gregorovic.

Bannbreker’s cry. Not warlike, not angry, but a sound of grim determination and relief at something being concluded. Something ended after an arduous endurance trial.

Closure.

The pain had been short-lived. Careful fingers had closed my eyelids, the memory of it tactile rather than visual.

It hadn’t been revenge. The part of me that had spent more time than I’d care admit trying to decipher her motivations knew it wouldn’t be. It wasn’t her nature.

She hadn’t been the one to die. No, she lived still; the state of the flora in this place testament enough to that. The continued efforts to repair damage of the physical kind had been manifested in crystal, the physical echoed in her soul.

_Anima Sanitatis._

The crouch became a seat on the knotted platform. I planted my hands on my knees and leaned back.

Laughter continued until my entire midsection complained.

 

………..

 

I marveled at it while investigating the network.

_Anima Sanitatis. A part of her became mine, now I’ve become a part of her very soul._

Did she know? Was Bannbreker aware of my presence?

Suspicion seemed likely even if she didn’t know. Her fragment certainly hadn’t gone unnoticed within me, sensations and influences that’d rendered me an oddity among Sliske’s forces affording some measure of…

Something. Nothing so grand as hope, but a sense of fortitude where none should’ve existed. Of _resistance._

Another platform drew my attention, its tree lush and vibrant. Whereas the first hadn’t been unusual in form save its single flash of red, this one’s trunk bore what looked like netting comprised of silvery-blue light rolling up into the leaves and vanishing into their veins.

The wood, too, was strange. Not the healthy medium brown of the last, but a bleached, grayish-blue. The branches were wide at the base and narrowed at their ends - almost to points - before leaves had begun forming.

It bore too much resemblance to my staff to be coincidence.

This was a memory. Bannbreker’s memory, and of me.

I reached for the trunk, and the light lattice winding its way up beneath my hand held my gaze until it and everything around me disappeared.

 

...........

 

“Fucking _hell,_ Two-Arses…”

Not surprising. Anything pertaining to me would feature heavily-accented expletives and colloquialisms. I couldn’t recall a time we’d been in each other’s company without my being subjected to vivid imagery featuring body parts, animals, bodily functions, woodworking tools, and uncomfortable interactions between some or all of them.

A few had amused me, though I was loathe to admit it.

She was nervous.

No, that didn’t adequately encompass it; she was _frayed_ of nerve. Though the pacing and her cautious words made it obvious enough, there was an accompanying sense of Bannbreker’s past emotional state like an illusory second thought draped lightly over mine.

It was was diluted. Less substantial than what I recognized as my own. Nevertheless, it was prominent in her mind and disconcerting enough that I had to focus to avoid being influenced by her questionably-suppressed panic.

She’d braided everything. Bloody everything.

Moia’s hair was labyrinthine in design, braids intertwined with others in a graceful net. Bannbreker had clearly made some attempt to do the same to Daquarius’s hair with unfortunate results - a truncated nub jutted angrily from behind his ear like a misplaced horn.

The werewolf - whatever his name had been - aimed a murderous glare at Bannbreker. Red bled from iris to pupil, and his guttural snarl was residue of some recent intrusion. Tufts along the side of his face bore the mark of someone attempting to weave them together.

She’d tried braiding a werewolf’s mane. She would carry a knife to defend herself against natural wolves, but would sit cross-legged next to their more lethal and actively predatory counterparts and groom them like children.

 _And that miserable specter Death thinks he’s owed my soul, that_ I’ve _cheated a just fate._ Pah!

_Yet here she is, quite alive. I am not, or less so than she._

I did away with the thought before it could bother me more than it already had.

She’d planted herself next to me - the memory of me - and had begun weaving the ends of my cape together in yet another braid. I’d stood and turned in alarm.

My words to her then had belied my thoughts at the time. I recalled it well enough; setting her mind at ease had been as simple as allowing her to vent both in word and in her attentions to the edges of my cape. Implying I’d been as trepidatious as she about our company had cinched it.

Then again, she hadn’t - wasn’t - regarding the duplicate me without suspicion.

“You’d better not be talking keech to me, Nomad.”

I had been, but it had been enough to afford me time to wedge a piece of Jas’s stone free before anyone had come to realize the nature of my subterfuge.

Events unfolded as they had before, and I watched myself aim the staff-become-spear and throw it at the barbarian.

She caught it. Threw it back.

She was too trusting, too plagued by optimism, and there was no end to her gullibility, but she was far and far from indecisive. There was practicality buried beneath all that unlikely hope. Though I’d scorned her decision and called her a mercenary for returning the throw, part of me had revelled in her choice.

I watched as my betrayal stung her features into an exhibit of hurt and anger. I’d escaped despite both that and despite Zamorak’s devastating blow, but hadn’t witnessed anything after narrowly avoiding their collective wrath.

She swore dramatically for some time, then spoke to the god of my parents. Some trace remained of her anger and disappointment as she conversed quietly with him, and I watched more than listened as those last hints faded and she focused on the god and the matter at hand.

Something about Sliske, Jas’s artifact, and trust. Whatever she said next seemed to anger the god of chaos and he stiffened, but Bannbreker didn’t flinch.

In fact, she seemed to be gathering herself to shout at him.

I smiled.

_Bloody cheerful, yes. Infuriatingly hopeful. Blind and trusting to a fatal degree. But you are not weak, barbarian; had circumstances differed only slightly, I might’ve one day called you “student.” The roots of my philosophy are exemplified in you and could have seen greatness, evocative metaphors and all._

Sliske’s empty chamber dissolved back into the root network as I removed my hand from the tree and looked around at the soul into which I’d been deposited.

_Greater greatness._

Credit where credit was due.

 

……….

 

_Jerrod, that was it. That was the werewolf’s name._

Another tree, similar in composition to the last but for leaves which had silvered until they resembled the wood of the branches, caught my attention and I went to it.

This memory was more difficult to endure. I nearly pulled my hand off the tree to avoid the experience several times, the potent combination of Bannbreker’s memories and my own excruciating.

Pain prevailed over everything. Hers, mine. I was aching, wounded, tired, and yet her arm was the focal point for it. The spectral agony was intense despite the distinction between her memory-sensations and my own.

The other image of me fell, and the barbarian’s scream provoked a synonymous whine in my right ear.

There was a sense of something else beyond the pain as the memory-me dropped beyond sight. Not fear, precisely, though there was a substantial quantity of that.

Failure. Not fear but a fear _realized._

She’d bested me, although at cost to herself.

Failure, it was definitely that. I knew it all too well, but why would she perceive this memory as a failing?

_She won. Demonstrated herself to be the better combatant between the two of us._

Loss of limb hadn’t changed that. I’d been made privy to her vision for a better, safer world with our brief contact, but nothing that’d occurred after my fall would have deterred her from maintaining it.

Not her. It seemed impossible that anything _would_ or _could_ strip Bannbreker of her closely-guarded belief in the inevitability of such a world. I’d felt the tenacity to which she clung to the image, the tentative goal, the hope.

Failure. And _disappointment._

My death - if that’s what it was - wasn’t responsible. It hadn’t been the arm she lost, either, but the manner in which she’d lost it.

The disappointment was in _me._ For my…

_...for having given up. Refusing the vision she offered me._

The thought was a whisper, not so much sound as knowledge delivered to me with the flavor of her voice.

"Scunnersome bag of wet arses, _why?_ Why couldn’t you join _me_ as a friend, damn you? You didn’t give me a bloody choice but I damned well gave you one, so _why?"_

She didn’t know. Truly didn’t understand it despite everything.

_Because that future can never be, Bannbreker. Because you refused the only possible means by which it could be achieved and spat upon the sacrifice I was willing to make. Not…_

I watched as she rocked at the edge of the bridge, cradling the remainder of her arm and howling obscenities.

_...not because I didn’t want that future._

The bridge where I’d succumbed to the fall wavered, the memory-vision distorting and twisting until warm air and a campfire replaced it.

The barbarian’s thoughts and sensations faded with the change in scenery. I looked around, listening to sharp cracks and creaks as wood burned in the little fire, uncertain.

What was this? This wasn’t the same memory. The change had been too abrupt.

_Two memories in the same tree?_

I pulled my hand briefly from it and was returned to the living soul network. My hand curled around it again.

Still the grass and trees, the warm air, and the fire.

_No, not the same memory. Connected to it. But I’ve never encountered her here. Why would she associate this with our battle in the dog-god’s domain?_

Bannbreker sat by the fire alongside a second figure. A Mahjarrat.

“Hm. I became decently well-versed in thaumaturgical healing and pain reduction methods during my time as a…during my time in the Empire. If you want, we could try those. There’d be no chance of allergic reactions, I can be certain of that-”

_“Wahisietel…”_

I sat, listening to them speak as old friends. Something significant had occurred between them, and apologies were exchanged.

She was the first to extend one, of course.

Memories, too, were shared. Some bitter and painful, including the attempted retrieval of Jas’s Stone. Others warm, her mention of a husband - Adrius - tinged with pain but mostly imbued with fond recollection.

And something about a sock hung from a doorknob. The Mahjarrat being effectively barred from entering his own home when it was present.

_What?_

More conversation filled gaps in the picture until I burst out laughing.

_No wonder you survived your battles with me, and with others. You befriend one Mahjarrat and take another to bed with you._

My insides ached again. Despite her being a constant pest and interfering with everything I did, her verve disinterred the corpse of long-forgotten laughter and reanimated it.

I hadn’t paid strict attention to it all, however, and the puzzle of what this memory had in common with the last remained.

That was, until she spoke again.

“He…Sliske…he’s taken everything from me. My husband. My legs. My peace. My friends. Everything. Taken it all and replaced it with his face like the sneering bastard he is."

Sliske. That was the connection. It hadn’t anything to do with me directly but with something - some _one_ \- that linked us and linked these memories.

Bannbreker’s hatred for the shadow-manipulating bastard found mine and amplified it. It was too much, and I’d nearly disconnected from the tree before the surroundings shifted again.

A bar replaced the campsite, and one I dimly recognized. The name escaped me as the werewolf Jerrod’s name had, but I knew the arrangement of tables and chairs.

...as well as the furious and deeply inebriated woman standing atop one of those tables, bellowing to an enthralled audience. She gestured with her glass to the rapt crowd while delivering her belch-punctuated speech in clusters of bewildering syllables.

“He’s a reit dobber, he is! ‘Is heed’s a loose left ball, ‘is eyes are like a demon’s arsehole, an’ he’s got a brain tha’s bin cooked sideways by sools an’ fa knows whit else! Th’ next time I see 'im, I’ll git 'im a scar on th’ otter side a his coopon to mat, an’ I’ll shove 'is left ball heed reit up 'is arse where it belongs!

Ye hear me, Nomad? Yer an auld, gantin, scunnersome, rat-cheil who’s nae worth th’ tissue ye wipe yer crease wi’! So gang back in yer tent an’ GIT FUCKED!”

_There are corpses buried in Morytania who heard that racket, Bannbreker. Not that they understood it any more than I do._

I chuckled.

The chuckle tapered off as I took in her state.

This wasn’t a casual carousing. Not celebratory or lighthearted.

She looked like hell.

There were dark circles beneath her eyes that sank nearly to pits. She was grievously injured, bandaged. She was thinner, what little softness there’d been having withered away. She hadn’t eaten in some time.

She looked haggard. Worn, and the signs layered and deep as they tended to do over an extended period of rough living. She looked leaner, starved almost, the already muscular and defined body now carved painfully by some sculptor who’d forgotten to soften their piece. Spare and minimal.

Stripped of reserves, empty.

I pulled my hand from the silvered wood and watched the light lattice pulse slowly up the tree’s surface.

 

...........

 

_Strength. She-_

_HE._

I was no longer in contact with the tree, but a new presence had discovered this place and sensed me. It was more distant than the secondary sensation of Bannbreker’s emotions and physical state as I’d shared her memories, but I was no longer alone.

Metal and bile surged along the back of my tongue and a sharp pain accompanied the sudden tension in my shoulders.

They… no. _He_ approaching. And _fast._

_No! No not him! Damn you, barbarian…_

Too fast. The not-pattern of percussive beats from earlier began again, sped up, the resonant bombardment grouped and the spaces between them shorter. It sounded like a cannon.

_A cannon. That’s what the sound is. The device on her arm. She’s in battle._

_With HIM._

_And he knows I’m here._

He couldn’t find me here. Not again, never again.

I turned away from the source of the copper-salt-refuse feeling and ran along the pathway, stumbling twice. My chest began to ache and I ignored it. The sense of him was receding slowly behind me as I ran, but he’d detected something and I had no wish to reward his perceptiveness with a reunion.

Shame and terror. Vulnerability and violation. Panic flooded me and I sped up, desperate to avoid the man Bannbreker had so foolishly engaged.

The roots and crystals changed gradually as I ran from a relatively healthy network to one rendered warped and corrupted. The wood was darker here, red light similar to the brief streak I’d seen travel up the first healthy tree now tracing each root and tendril in the path ahead. The crystal had become a sour green.

The tree platforms were no more, but several wide branches lined one side of the path. Their wood was as dark as the roots beneath my feet and they were bare of luminous blooms.

Tainted. Unhealthy. Diseased and festering. Rotting, and the damage here had soured even the crystals’ ability to heal and perverted them.

_Nevermind. Doubtless this was the damage done to her soul when a portion of it was removed and given to me. Forced into me._

I stopped, labored breaths billowing my scarf as I struggled to recover.

Nothing. I’d outdistanced him.

The bass sounds of cannon fire had ceased. Either she was his prisoner or Bannbreker had gotten the upper hand, but she was no longer in combat.

I sighed, resting a hand against one of the fouled branches.

It was a mistake.

 

...........

 

There was no transition this time, only a sharply-defined and disconcerting flip from the malignant tangle of Bannbreker’s wounded soul to a small, uninteresting bedroom.

She wasn’t an adult but approaching it, perhaps twelve or thirteen. She was panicked and standing in the doorway, wrestling with some decision that left evidence in her wary posture and wide eyes.

The source of the panic was obvious enough and my gaze didn’t linger.

The other was here, too. Ronnie… no. That had been a diminutive form of the name; the full one was spoken now in mixed tones of pleading and apprehension. Athrhan.

I heard Athrhan speak and knew. Heard Bannbreker’s response and _knew._

_No! Athrhan has no intention of helping you, little barbarian. Leave. LEAVE!_

She didn’t. I’d known it, seen the trust and frailty in the younger sister’s expression and heard it in her voice. Uncertainty, but despite it, trust.

There was nothing human in Athrhan’s.

_RUN, BANNBREKER… FINLEY! GET THE HELL OUT OF THIS ROOM! GET AWAY FROM HER AND DO IT NOW!_

“You trust me, don’t you? I’m going to _help_ you, Fish-Brains.”

 _“I’m going to_ help _you,_ νομάς. _Assist you in exceeding your limits, in becoming greater than you are. The power you’ll wield will be unparalleled, but greatness never comes without putting yourself forth in the effort. You will gather test subjects for me. You will provide for me. Resources. Whatever I require. And you will do so with gratitude writ upon that gaunt face and in those rebellious eyes.”_

I yanked my hand from the knotted growth and stumbled away, the heel of my boot finding empty space behind me. Wheeling my arms and wobbling forward, my hand brushed the limb again and a brief image seared itself into my mind before I could pull free.

For the first time in decades, I knew nausea. On hands and knees I hovered over the edge of the rotten path and stared into the empty void below, tugging at my scarf and exposing the lower half of my face.

_“And cover your mouth when you come back - I’d rather not see the mess you’ve made of yourself.”_

I heaved, the stomach that hadn’t seen food in just as long offering nothing and the exhales were dry, thready.

_Her sister. Her sister, Athrhan. Bannbreker has known it, too._

Shame cascaded through me, quickening old blood and making me dizzy. I sank, laying flat on the root path and breathing harshly. My hand gripped the edge of a root and bones shrieked in my fingers.

The pain wasn’t stimulus enough to relax the hold.

There was no letting go, only breathing, harsh and more labored than it had been after my sprint down the living walkway.

Terror. I knew this terror in the taste that had flooded my mouth. In clenched muscles.

Bannbreker… Finley. She knew this terror.

I remained thus until it passed, getting slowly and cautiously to my feet while avoiding the malignant limb. It glowed corrosively in the dark red of old blood.

There was no remaining near it, not if I wished to escape both her memory and mine. I continued down the path, seeking someplace else to rest and to hide. Walking and stepping were measured carefully.

I was tiring, too. Finding a place to rest properly had risen in priority, rapidly after the encounter with that memory.

Weariness had taken its toll. I stumbled in my exhaustion and grabbed another dead - or undead - outcropping and my surroundings _flipped_ again.

 

..........

 

This time the environment was subterranean - the air quality and echoes not dissimilar to other caves I’d explored in the past - and abysmally dark. A group of Fremennik men and women were scouting with torches raised and grim expressions on their faces. Finley was among them.

Along the walls, clutches of eggs sat glistening and wet in the torchlight. In some cases they’d been deposited inside hollowed-out and rotting human corpses, the creatures inside them wriggling and causing the eggs to move.

Most of the viscera in the bodies had been removed or eaten and the creature responsible had left little for its young to ingest.

When they hatched, they would not be content to remain in their grisly nests for long.

I watched as they set torches to the eggs, the creatures inside them whistling and screaming as they were overheated and then incinerated. Few among the team spoke, barring the occasional, “this way,” or, “don’t leave a one left!”

There was no sense of happy camraderie here. These were soldiers exhausted and drained of everything vital, razing the nests with no sense of vigor or pride in a job well done.

Even Bann… Finley spoke little.

Before I could remove my hand, there was another _shift_ and a man aiding a very wan, frighteningly thin Finley to a bed spoke softly to her.

She cried out in her sleep - or perhaps delirium - the words simple and empty of her colorful invective.

“No, aye, no… Athrhan… no, he’s dead, he can’t! I can’t…”

She’d looked horrible in the bar, bawling her story half at the ceiling and half at the group seated around her while they whooped and encouraged and refilled her glass.

This was worse. She looked...

_Fragile._

She vomited noisily next to the bed. I caught little of the conversation once she’d finished emptying her stomach, the immense difference between this husk of a woman and the barbarian I’d known rendering her almost unrecognizable.

I pulled my hand away.

_This… how does one survive this? Survive this and continue to be what she is? How does anyone suffer as she’s suffered without becoming something else?_

_How have you not become what I am, Bannbreker? Finley? Where is your hatred? How is this defiled portion of your soul not representative of the whole?_

 

_.........._

 

My boots met the path one after the other, and my gaze traveled and marked places to step and to avoid through the buzzing clamor in my head. I was no longer fascinated by the paths, their mystery tainted by the horrors contained here. Taking extra care to avoid brushing against the limbs required no additional motivation.

I had no desire to witness more. It had been enough.

 _“No desire?” I_ can’t _take more of this._

The corrupt roots became smoother, almost stony and uniform as I walked farther. The limbs became smaller, withered. I stopped, looking ahead.

A sheer drop waited several steps in front of me, the ossified wood lifeless and smooth. It looked like someone had cut the outward-facing end of the path and sanded it flat, scorching the end with a prolonged stream of dragonfire.

_What was stolen is returned, but her soul still bears the scar. It recognizes the damage done._

It looked disturbingly like soot-coated bone, the edge mottled with black.

I approached it and sat, allowing my legs to dangle over the edge and staring into the darkness below.

_She has known all of it._

Athrhan. Not a street urchin driven to the depths of depravity by survival, but a child who’d had a family. Cared for as Finley had been cared for.

_Broken. No… incomplete. As he was._

As Oreb had been.

Emptiness stared at me, but despite the absence of light it didn’t feel like a void. Nothing like the null space that existed in the barbarian’s older sister or my onetime master.

_She faces him. I failed, as I failed elsewhere. The god constructed to defend the world torn asunder and discarded. I failed and he lives still._

I shuddered. I was afraid, and absolutely exhausted. The image from the bedroom lingered and nausea that could never be appeased settled in again.

_Her sister was a monster. Her husband lost, whether to disease or violence or misfortune. She faces another like Athrhan now. If he overtakes Finley..._

The silence was overwhelming after the memory-voices and the irregular pounding bass of her arm cannon firing in the distance. There were no welcome distractions in this hellish little refuge and I could dodge the thoughts no longer.

The bar, the bandages, the haggardness. The loss. I’d helped shape that loss.

_Monsters plagued her life._

Sliske. Facing his slaver.

_She avenged us both._

Her belch- and hiccup-punctuated proclamation in the bar. Her face contorted in a mixture of pain and disappointment as she’d thrown my own weapon back at me.

_Monsters plagued her life as she plagued mine._

The arm. The exhaustion. The wear upon her. She’d stood despite crippling blow after crippling blow, but doing so had exacted a price visible in this place as it was nowhere else despite the scars he’d seen.

_I was instrumental in creating this part of her. Or changing it. The memories that have withered a bit of her soul and left it rotting inside her, some of them my doing. It doesn’t seem to be spreading, but it exists, and the fault is partially mine to bear._

Her life was a study in trials, and yet she persevered. Spat her colorful and strangely benign insults with a voice that lent menace and gravity to them only when she wished. Swore at gods and at me.

_I am one of her monsters._

The sound of her cannon reached me again, more distant than it had been earlier. I tensed, listening.

Quiet again. A truly foreign new feeling introduced itself.

I welcomed it. What was left to lose?

_Refute him, Finley Bannbreker. Succeed where I have failed._

_Avenge me._

_Live, barbarian. Live so we might both live._

_Live long enough to find me here._

_Live so I may help you. Finally join you, if not as a friend, then at the very least as one who is no longer your enemy. You will need me for what’s to come, and I am finally willing to offer what I can. Anything I can to end him._

_Live, Finley Bannbreker._

**Author's Note:**

> This fan fiction includes characters and some headcanons of SaxSpieler's creation, as well as excerpts from several of her own works. I've taken a couple of liberties with certain things (and hopefully haven't violated any timelines or headcanons either established or still in the planning stages.)
> 
> This work is also spoils of a spam war between Tribunus and myself. Since both sides suffered "fatalities," Sax is the recipient of both Tribsart and this here fic thing.
> 
> Anything worthwhile in here is purely credit to Sax's awesome headcanons. Any and all mistakes are mine.


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